After 20 years of investigations upon sunken ships filled with toxic waste, an Italian public prosecutor makes the first move in a naval combat against the organised crime.
written by Cecilia Anesi published on wasteemergency.com
It has finally been found, thanks to the confession of Francesco Fonti, a pentito (Mafioso turned informant), a ship loaded with barrels of radioactive waste that was sunk off the coast of Cetraro, in Calabria, south of Italy.
The ship sleeps there, in the deepness of sea like a marine monster lay down on a side, with the mouth exploded in pain. Some barrels are slipping out, many are hidden in its stomach.
But its eternal rest has now been interrupted, and its secret unveiled. A pentito of the ‘Ndrangheta – Calabria’s organised crime – has confessed to the public prosecutor of the city of Paola (Calabria), Bruno Giordano, of having personally caused the sinking of that boat, which was filled with 120 barrels or radioactive waste.
The ship was found on September 12 thanks to a robot sent by the authority of Calabria Region, and its position was exactly that described by the pentito: 20 miles away from the coast of Cetraro, 500 metres under water, laying on a side with a wrecked prow.
The finding is owed to the public prosecutor Giordano and the Calabria Region, but now the biggest problems are to begin. The removal of the ship, and especially its load, require a long, difficult and risky work. Funds are needed from the state, but it is still unclear whether they will obtain them or not.
For now, they have received the full support of Legambiente, an Italian NGO for the protection of the environment. Its president has provided the public prosecutor Giordano with all the data collected by Legambiente since 1994 concerning the disappearance of at least 40 ships in Mediterranean waters.
Those boats have all been sunk in the 80s and beginning of 90s. The story is always the same one: no one of them has ever launched a may-day and their crew has simply disappeared.
Why then for more than 20 years nobody has ever managed to go and find a boat nevertheless the many investigations by magistrates and confessions of pentiti?
The answer is simple: for too many years magistrates have been left alone, with no support whatsoever from the state. Those who were profiting out of poisoning both land and water with the traffic of toxic waste have act unpunished, and have killed more people than thought, to begin with the RAI3 journalist Ilaria Alpi, killed in Somalia precisely because she had discovered truths on the international traffic of toxic waste.
Enrico Fontana and Nuccio Barillà, directors of Legambiente, who have denounced many suspicious disappearances of ships in the Mediterranean sea, think the National Prosecution against Mafia and the Ministry of Environment shall intervene. They said to the paper Repubblica that “we shall create a unity of crisis for the monitoring of those areas where the increase of radioactivity is correlated to a peak of cancer.
“We want to know the truth about the linkages between the traffic of waste and that of weapons, the connections between Ilaria Alpi’s death and the stealing of plutonium and radioactive waste.”
It would not be impossible to do so, nor it would be hard to trace a map of the sunken ships as scattered around Italian seas. It could be done by uniting all the individual works of collection of information done by many Italian magistrates during the last twenty years.
Some of these stories are of public domain.
There is the story of the motor vessel Nikos that in 1985, during its trip from La Spezia (Italy) to Lomè (Togo), disappears possibly half way between Lebanon and Greece. In the same year the German boat Koraline sinks off the coast of Ustica (Italy). A year after, in 1986, is the ship Mikigan, which left from Marina di Carrara in Tuscany, to sink further down in the Tirreno sea, facing Calabria. Only a year after the boat Rigel shipwrecks. In 1989 the Maltese motor vessel Anni drowns in international waters off the coast of Ravenna. In 1990 the boat Jolly Rosso strands along the coast in the province of Caserta. In 1993 it’s the turn of Marco Polo ship, which simply disappears in the Channel of Sicily.
What emerges is an international business of huge scope, orchestrated by the organised crime, but which immense profit has been divided between more people, individuals which do not belong to the Mafia itself, but are rather enterpreuners and politicians that have either operated in the darkness to cover the whole thing or simply collaborated. (as the L’Espresso has already unveiled in 2005).
A perfect example is that of Giorgio Comerio and its disposal company, the Odm (Oceanic Disposal Management), which since 1987 has been offering ways of getting rid of toxic waste by shooting steel torpedo down the sea until they would get stuck 50 metres under the ocean floor.
He believes not to breach the London Convention that forbids the disposal of radioactive material in the sea, and maybe he is right since the law may not be accurate enough. But still, it sounds incredible that one man can pollute even his own land or sea for profit.
Sadly enough, reality seems to go well beyond fantasy, and the finding of this ship only further confirms human stupidity.
